In response to Council pay raise

0
143
In response to Council pay raise
(Graphic/Jessica Kim)
Facebooktwittermail

To the editor:

As recently demonstrated by a pay increase for our elected leaders, Alexandria continues its transition towards making local government a full-time job. This is the wrong direction for three reasons: it harms the fiduciary role of Council, it emphasizes a technocratic – not democratic – approach to government and it provides a convenient breeding ground for insincere and transactional political leadership.

Arguments for increasing pay seem common sense at first. With an extensive list of duties, representatives may require added financial support to make their service sustainable. One can also fairly argue that additional resources allow the city to access a broader range of leaders who otherwise lack the means to serve.

But such a policy, on balance, takes us further from good local government. This is because we cannot reasonably expect stewards of government to remain sustainable fiduciaries when materially and financially connected to what they administer. Such pay can also cultivate the mistaken and misleading expectation that Council should strive to mimic the expertise of city staff. Not only does this undercut the benefits of having staff expertise, but it evades the primary work voters ask of their representatives: to implement a wise mandate in sync with the public mood. In this, understanding an issue is important, but only instrumentally so, as obsessive fact-finding just begs the question of values and good judgment that voters expect of leaders.

Reasonable people may still, in good faith, disagree on the merits of elected leadership pay, but there is also a hidden cost to subsidizing the growth of a professional leadership class. This is the entrenchment of a political machine that uses Alexandria cynically to advertise to a larger audience of future voters for a different elected office. Not to be confused with a healthy dose of honest ambition, this approach is in fact a disingenuous sleight of hand. It makes us a quasi-finishing school for the ideologically close-minded and prevents us from implementing locally adapted solutions to improve community affairs.

I want to live in a city where those among us, not over us, lead. We’ve been seeing less of that lately. We must protest when leadership shows a lack of restraint on elected compensation.

-Kevin Dunne, Alexandria

instagram
Facebooktwittermail